Saddam's guard tells of arsenal and terror links

The Iraqi leader’s senior bodyguard had fled with details of his secret arsenal, Australia’s popular Herald-Sun newspaper reported - including Scud missiles from north Korea and biological weapons in two bunkers buried in the Iraq’s western desert.

The bodyguard, Abu Hamdi Mahmoud, had provided Israeli intelligence with a list of sites, the newspaper said, as he was debriefed at a high-security Israeli base.

It quoted William Tierney, a former UN weapons inspector who has continued to gather information on Saddam’s arsenal, as saying Mahmoud’s information was "the smoking gun" that has so far proved so elusive for both the UN weapons inspectors and US intelligence.

"Once the inspectors go to where Mahmoud has pointed them, then it’s all over for Saddam," Mr Tierney said.

The newspaper said Mahmoud was a member of the elite unit that protects Saddam, called the Murasiq Qun - the "Inner Circle". Known as "the Gatekeeper", Mahmoud was a muscular Saddam lookalike often photographed standing behind Saddam .

The Israeli prime minister, Ariel Sharon, would use his evidence to "shatter the growing anti-war movement," the newspaper quoted a source close to Mr Sharon. "He plans to call all those European leaders who are wavering to let them know how Saddam has continued to fool Hans Blix and his weapons inspectors."

The New Yorker magazine, meanwhile, yesterday picked up what has been a constant theme in US media reports in recent days - the alleged links between the Iraqi regime and bin Laden’s al-Qaeda network.

Terrorism experts in Britain and other countries have been sceptical of these supposed links. But the article’s author, Jeffrey Goldberg, citing intelligence sources, dated such ties back to the early 1990s.

Al-Qaeda and Saddam reached "a non-aggression pact in 1993, and the relationship deepened further in the mid-1990s", he reported.

At that time an Iraqi-born al-Qaeda operative, Abu Abdullah al-Iraqi, was sent by bin Laden to request training from the Iraqis in the use of poison gas.

"Al-Iraqi’s mission was successful," Mr Goldberg reports, "and an unknown number of trainers from an Iraqi secret police organisation called Unit 999 were dispatched to camps in Afghanistan to instruct al-Qaeda terrorists."

George Tenet, the Central Intelligence Agency’s director, said: "Credible information indicates that Iraq and al-Qaeda have discussed safe haven and reciprocal non-aggression."

He added that if Saddam remains in power: "Baghdad’s links to terrorists will increase."

Mr Goldberg writes that US intelligence also "takes seriously" reports that an Iraqi known as Abu Wa’el acts as Saddam’s liaison officer to the radical Islamic group Ansar al-Islam in northern Iraq.

Ansar al-Islam, which is widely thought to have close links with al-Qaeda, was formed when two extremist Kurdish groups merged.

The article alleges that Ansar al-Islam quickly became the base for an al-Qaeda subgroup named Jund al-Shams, or soldiers of the Levant.

"Jund al-Shams is controlled by a man named Mussa’ab al Zarqawi [who] is believed by European intelligence agencies to be al-Qaeda’s main specialist in chemical and biological terrorism," it said.

The US believes he escaped from Afghanistan to Baghdad after the US invaded Afghanistan.

Mr Goldberg argues, citing intelligence officials, that "the relationship between bin Laden and Saddam’s regime was brokered in the early 1990s by a leading Islamist radical in Sudan".

Mr Tenet puts the US on notice, however, that future al-Qaeda attacks are more likely than not. "My worry is that, whatever we learn, it will never be enough. There will be another attack. They will take advantage of seams in our security. If you’re looking for infallibility in the intelligence system, you’re going to be constantly surprised and pained."